The present invention pertains to a conveying device for conveying preferably heavy materials to be conveyed on pallets or the like along an essentially horizontal conveying track on the floor of a room or in the open air.
The term “pallet” as used above and hereinafter shall not be defined in the limited sense of the word; rather, the present invention also comprises systems in which other conveying units, for example, skeleton containers, are used to convey materials to be conveyed, especially individually packaged products, in or on them. If the material to be conveyed is a larger individually packaged product with a comparatively larger base, “pallets” or the like can be eliminated altogether.
Pallet conveying tracks of this type are, contrary to normal belt type conveyors or roller conveyors, which are designed for small, light-weight materials to be conveyed, are comparatively heavy and clumsy, have large dimensions and have a very stable design in order to make it possible to reliably pick up and convey heavy loads within a conveying system, for example, in a commissioning unit, on pallets, as the name already implies. Pallets including the material to be conveyed that is located on it may form a parallelepiped of a size that has a base with a length of 1.2 m×a width of 0.8 m and has a height of 1.4 m. Another embodiment even provides for a double width of 1.2 m at equal length and height. A pallet plus the load may weigh up to 1,250 kg. The pallet conveying system must have a correspondingly stable design. It is obvious that pallet conveying systems are installed, for static reasons, mainly on the floor of a warehouse or in open air rather than in a high position in a warehouse, and long paths must many times be traveled from the site at which the material to be conveyed is introduced into the storage facility to the site at which it is removed from the storage facility. Because of the installation of the pallet conveying track near the floor, the storage room can be utilized for other logistic considerations, for example, motions of material being conveyed, machines and/or persons, in a storage facility or in the open air only in parallel to the conveying track.